A typical network environment such as a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), or the Internet includes a number of network devices such as servers, switches, routers, hubs, firewalls, load balancers, and storage devices and controllers. A number of user devices and at least one network management device are connected to, the network and in communication with the network devices. Generally, network devices are accessible to user devices or a network management device through network protocols such as a simple network management protocol (SNMP). Known network protocol commands such as SNMP commands have limited capabilities, and are used generally for sending and receiving specific information relating to predefined functions of a particular network device.
Network devices contain internal state information or management information such as, for example, port status and VLAN configurations, that is of interest to a user for debugging or trouble shooting, for example. To access the network devices for this type of information, the user typically has to interface with the network device generally through text-based command language such as a command line interface (CLI), which is considered to be much more user friendly and offers more capabilities than an SNMP interface. A connection to the network device typically requires connecting a communication cable directly to the network device from a portable device such as a laptop PC locally at the network device.